Blood Shaper

Footsteps against stone bricks let out quiet clacking noises as Kay’s party moved into the dungeon. It was an interesting party, comprised of Kay, Eleniah, Kay’s guards who would only be participating in fights if Kay needed help staying alive or if there were enough enemies to make it worth it for everyone to participate, and Miri the mysterious maid, who was following Kay for reasons he wasn’t entirely clear about. He remembered that she’d supposedly been tasked by Alahna or someone else in the palace work hierarchy to be Kay’s guide during his sightseeing tour of the city, but she’d also showed up that morning with breakfast and was now following him into a dungeon. She also might not join them in fights or maybe she would? Kay was unsure about that as well thanks to her unclear answers.

Ignoring the confusing woman, there was a dungeon to clear. Or at clear as much as possible, there were areas they would completely steamroll that weren’t worth going to and the actual boss of the dungeon would be too powerful for even their group. A dedicated team of tier fives with assigned roles was necessary to take down the boss, making this dungeon one of the most difficult to beat under the sole control of a nation. It was also a coveted boss to kill because the high difficulty came with a sweet loot table. The swath they were going to clear their way through was the section that led to the boss, and according to Eleniah’s info they were going to beat at least one of the minibosses before turning back. In addition to it’s powerful final foe, the dungeon was also very long in order to make it a challenge for higher tier adventurers. At least, that’s what everyone assumed since each addition the dungeon had made added stronger enemies, tougher bosses, and longer areas.

Eleniah had deliberately refused to tell him the name of the dungeon and specifically what kind of enemies were within, in order to “not ruin the surprise” and “give him the authentic experience”. So he had no idea what to expect when they turned the corner into a wide open room made of the same dull colored stone bricks and slabs. The room was better lit than the hallway, but only by a little, with the same smokeless torches letting off dim flickering light that made the shadows dance like flittering fairies. A series of stone blocks dotted the room, looking like unfinished pillars or uncarved steles. At the far end was an archway filled with a solid sheet of rock without handles or knobs.

“Alright,” Eleniah whispered to him, “You go first.”

He turned a suspicious look at her. “…Why?”

“Because I’ll give away the surprise if you look at me.” She replied, with “duh” in her tone. “You don’t get to go in as a fresh newbie adventurer so the least I can do is give you a little bit of that feel of exploration and wonder that they get the first time they come into this dungeon.”

“Or, you think it’ll be funny to watch me jump when whatever is in there surprises me.”

“I didn’t say that.”

Kay stared into her eyes before very slowly and deliberately rolling his eyes at her. He let a trickle of blood run out of his nose, then both nostrils. The trickle became a gushing of red liquid that trailed down his face and over his chin. It solidified as it met the edge of his armor and built on top of itself piece by piece like a sand castle made out of droplets of wet sand until it covered his head and smoothed out.

“Ew!”

Ignoring her outburst of disgust, which he’d been hoping to evoke, Kay turned and stalked into the room, sweeping it for danger as he went. He couldn’t see anything on the ceiling or hiding among the shadows, and Eleniah wouldn’t be amused to watch him be ambushed by standard ambushers, because that was to be expected and thus wasn’t funny. There was also the possibility that this was a puzzle dungeon that would punish failures with fights against monsters, which would allow them to get into fights while also amusing Eleniah by letting her watch Kay fail puzzles. There was no writing on the stone blocks, but it could be a repeating kind of puzzle that followed a pattern established early on…

Kay tried pushing at one of the blocks and it didn’t move, nor did it rotate when he tried to turn it. With no responses to his fiddling he moved on to the next stone and once again nothing moved. He decided to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. There were twenty slabs, in five rows of four laid out evenly. The torches that illuminated the room hung from the four walls, making it darker the closer you got to the center and the more blocks of stone you let surround you. There were no carvings or words anywhere that he could see and Eleniah refused to give him any hints. Miri had an expression on her face that let him know she’d tell him if he asked, but as annoying as it was for Eleniah to pull something like this, he didn’t want to ruin her fun. There was no chance she’d send him into a situation blind if she expected it to be potentially deadly, so he doubted he was in any real danger unless he fucked up. Later in the dungeon, after this first surprise, he expected things to get more dangerous, but the first room should be fine.

Without anything else to go on, Kay started moving toward the center of the room, where the shadows cast by the imposing blocks of stone were deepest. As a vampire his eyesight in dark places was much better than it had been as a human so even with the limited light he was still able to make everything out. There were no hints in the middle of the room either, he could tell from a distance as he cleared one of the blocks and got a good line of sight, and he was starting to get confused and a little impatient. There was no point in trying to surprise him if there wasn’t a surprise, but how did he go about triggering it and getting it over with? A quick glance back at Eleniah had her looking expectant, not amused, so he still hadn’t started whatever it was yet.

In addition to his eyesight, Kay’s reaction times as a vampire were much better, although part of that was being much higher tier as much as it was his racial change. With those heightened reflexes he was just able to dodge the hand that burst up from under the floor and tried to grab his ankle. As he jerked his foot back and flowed into a defensive position, another hand erupted from the closest stone block, aiming for where his head had been just a moment ago. Many more than a handful of hands broke through the solid surfaces around Kay, all of them reaching out to grab him. He didn’t let any of them grab his body, although a few did get a hold of his armor and he chose to push those sections away from himself, letting the ripped off chunks regrow almost immediately.

The hands grasping something pulled back and matching fists punched through the rocks and pulverized the bits of armor that had been stolen. As a brutal beatdown began against cast off material, the hands that hadn’t grabbed anything started tearing at the ground, walls, and large stone blocks they’d come out of, quickly revealing the enemy to Kay. They looked like the terracotta warriors of ancient China, except they were a gray color instead of a terracotta brown. Each of the stone warriors was unarmed and dressed like pictures Kay had seen of old Japanese armor which added a weird dichotomy of two cultures to the monsters. They had armor made of stone sheets layered like scales covering stone arms and legs, and a stone helmet with a mask built into it covering stone faces. Kay found the juxtaposition of cultures that didn’t exist on this world combined with the useless armor built into what he assumed were golems for aesthetics to be surreal

The sound of stone cracking and an enemy flying away from Eleniah’s fist at high speed and slamming into a wall announced the start of the real battle. It also revealed that the surprise Eleniah had been waiting for was the exact thing Kay had expected it not to be, a regular ambush.

The fight was immediately a struggle, although not an unsurpassable one. Kay had experience with enemies that didn’t immediately fall before his high tier might, Eleniah and Meten were his regular sparring partners after all, but having a swarm of enemies coming at him that he couldn’t immediately tear to pieces was something he hadn’t experienced in a while. Storms made of highly pressurized blood blades that could tear through regular armor only chipped the stone of the golems bodies and they ignored the damage to continue charging at Kay. Fire hose level sprays only pushed them back a few inches and delayed them a few seconds and Kay was soon fighting on the moved to avoid getting swarmed.

Eleniah must have been building up for a powerful opening attack, because she too was dancing among the rubble of the stone blocks that had been shattered as golems burst out of them. Her skilled footwork moved her just out of range of the swinging fists and kicks of the golems and she countered with hammer blow punches that left dents and cracked sheets of armor. They moved toward one another as they fought, always keeping just ahead of the rush of enemies trying to drag them down. It quickly became evident that they had little to no practice fighting together, as they started messing up very early. Kay had to pull back on more than one attack to avoid hitting Eleniah as she dived forward at the same enemy he was about to take out, and more than one punch from her sent debris and shrapnel flying in his direction that he had to dodge or block.

While the golems were an actual challenge, Kay and Eleniah weren’t losing, which in this case meant they were winning. Limbs were torn off and tossed aside, leaving behind torsos that could do nothing other than lie there unthreateningly. Kay guessed there was a core to aim for and immediately proved himself right as a golem that he speared through the chest dissolved into a small pile of dirt. The golems were numerous, but not unending and as each one died the pile of the defeated grew and the living enemies pressuring the two of them became less.

Shortly after the battle started it ended, even with the lack of coordination the winning pair showed. The final blow was Kay’s and he deliberately grabbed the last golem, raised it over Eleniah’s head with giant hands he made out of blood before making a big drill and piercing the center of the golem to make sure he got the core. The dirt the last enemy became rained down over her dark hair and she turned to glare at him.

“Really?”

“That’s my line. Your big surprise is just an ambush?”

“You weren’t expecting it, were you?”

“I wasn’t, but that’s because its so obvious!”

“And thus my double trickery succeeded! Welcome to the Golem Army’s Citadel!”

“That’s the dungeon’s name?”

“Yeah. It’s all golems, which should be obvious at this point. Now that you’ve been successfully ambushed by mobile rocks, lets go over the different types of enemies to look out for, then we can go get stuck into a real fight!”